the color of my soul

husband's bestie has sold his place and is moving away at the end of the month. he's a truly lovely person, a retired pilot, and i will miss him because he's been a staple dinner guest at our house for over a decade, but husband will miss him even more. in fact, i'm a little worried about husband without him. a young couple has bought his place and the wife is apparently a fellow american. husband has briefly met them, but i haven't. they won't be the same, but if i've learned one thing, it's that things don't stay the same and you have to be open to what comes next. 

i've been reading a lot of new substacks of late and many are focused on the new years resolution genre. i guess it's just that time of year. a surprising number of them quote rumi. kind of weird how appropriated his work has been by the gratitude/self-help set. i can't decide if it's good that it pushes it to a wider audience or if it somehow cheapens it. maybe it's a bit of both. but anyway susan cain asks in the new year's edition of the quiet life, what color is your soul now? what color do you want it to be? which she doesn't attribute to rumi (though she does quote him in the stack), but marcus aurelius, "your soul takes on the color of your thoughts."

affected by the time of year, i think my soul is currently that wintery nordic greyish blue. it's not a terrible color for your soul to be. it's peaceful and quiet, if a little cold. it seems a little lighter and more tending towards the blue than the grey after yesterday's scream in the forest. it feels in tune with the slight slowly returning after the solstice. i think the color i want it to be is a sunny, bright yellow. and that will surely come with summer and the buzzing yellow of the canola fields. and it will no doubt pass through that brilliant light green of the first beech leaves as they unfurl in the spring on the way there. our souls aren't just one color, but the whole spectrum and that color can change with the season or even from day to day or minute to minute. but susan is right, that it's worth thinking about what you're feeding your soul. and currently, i want to feed mine light. 

drawing the threads together

i know i just lamented that autumn filled me with dread, but this evening, on the way home from my weaving group, it was just gorgeous. small tendrils of fog sneaking into the low spots, the blueish light that contains hints of the winter ahead descending, leaving trees to stand as starkly beautiful silhouettes, still clad in their leaves for now. it's strangely warm, it was still 13°C this evening, which probably explains the fog. it was a good day, spent at two different small museums, stretching my brain around how tablet weaving works, as well as how to create different patterns and a wider band on a small band loom. i am so fortunate to have amazing women in my life who know all about these things and who are patiently helping me rewire my brain. once again, i am struck that in weaving, i find deeper meaning - how we draw together the threads of our lives and find depth and beauty. my threads are still a bit tangled, but days like today move me in the right direction.

morning rituals

i read this morning that 15 minutes of meditation a day can have a great effect on the brain. and i'm thinking, i want my 50ish-year-old brain to operate like a 25-year-old one, as far as the functioning of the old grey matter is concerned. i don't recall searching for words at 25, so yes, bring that on. and it got me thinking about my morning ritual. it mostly consists of picking up my phone to see what madness the spray-tanned buffoon came up with overnight. i normally watch colbert and trevor to get their take on it - i find it hard to take it directly, i need it filtered through intelligent humor. then i turn off my sleep cycle app. then i get up, pretty much making the bed as i get out of it. i'm a bed maker, i think it's the one small ritual that sets the tone for your day. if you leave a neatly-made bed, there's a good chance of less chaos in the day that stretches ahead, even if the cats come along and lay on it during the day, leaving little hollows here and there. our cat bob won't lie on the bed unless it's made and if it's not, he'll come along and stare disdainfully until you make it. and i always make the bed.

next, i make a cup of tea. if it's the weekend, i'll make a pot, or rather husband makes a pot and brings me the first cup of tea in bed. that's a ritual that i love. but things sort of fizzle out from there. i sit down in front of the computer, checking mails, reading articles and blogs, fiddling around on pinterest, maybe writing a blog post like this one. mostly wasting time, if i'm honest. lately, i have australian master chef playing in the background, so i'm also half pondering what's for dinner later in the day (hmm, can i get squid somewhere nearby?).

i'm not sure any of these rituals are helping my brain very much, nor are they getting me regular exercise or making me more organized or helping me figure out what's next.

and speaking of my quest to figure out what's next, i've undertaken a major clearing out in our "box room," where we stashed all the boxes of books and stuff we didn't have room/shelves for when we moved here nearly a decade ago. i'm ruthlessly tossing lots of things that we haven't missed, but admittedly i probably should be even more ruthless about it. i'm hoping having that room more organized will create space in my brain for better habits that move me forward. so i guess i'd better get cracking. but first, maybe 15 minutes of meditation?

what is work?

all shall be illuminated...

sabin asked me this morning, "why don't you have a real work, mom?" and it really made me stop for a second and hold my breath. in her eyes, what constitutes a job is going to an office every day. what did i do to make that be her concept of what work is? she's growing up in a world where the concept of work is changing. work can be done online, from anywhere. your employer can be in another country or halfway across the world.  a lot more is being done on a freelance basis these days. so how do i explain that although i'm not going to an office on a daily basis, i am working? how to explain that today's work is a more ephemeral thing, with not much concrete to show for it at the end of the day? we're living in a so-called knowledge economy and very few of us actually MAKE things anymore in our daily work.

i think it's what attracts me to sewing and felting and crafting in general. i think we, as humans, WANT there to be something to show for what we've done at the end of the day. something other than an outbox full of emails, or another report. we want something in our hands that we can touch and see and show, as a physical object, to others. to leave a mark, for there to BE something there when we're finished. we want, in short, a less ephemeral existence (ironic, i know, as i'm putting these words out into the ether that is the internet).

i have this feeling that work is changing. and that it will be something completely different for sabin when she grows up. but i clearly have some way to go in preparing her for that. it will be interesting, because i'm not even sure myself what's next for me. i have these vague images of it and i'm working on making those more concrete, but i can't myself see where it will all end up.  so in the meantime, i leave words behind and i sew. and i hope that's enough.

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if you'd like to read some beautiful thoughts about what's next, go here.

and if you're pondering the really big questions in life: big cartel or etsy? go here.

or if you'd like to read about our new adventures in beekeeping, go here.

documentary photography

i learned something yesterday on my usual wednesday afternoon trip to the henie onstad art center (i'm going to miss that place). they had a new exhibition up of contemporary norwegian documentary photography. the photos were all recent ones by norwegian photographers. mentioned in the notes on several of the photos were that they harkened to the traditions of american documentary photographer walker evans (1903-1975) and german august sander (1876-1964) and i intend to look into their work a bit and learn more. i suppose another name for documentary photography is journalistic photography, but it's about depicting snapshots of life as it is. and i suppose it's where the notion that a picture is worth 1000 words came from.

most of the photographers in the exhibition had little interaction with their subjects, they just tried to capture moments without interference, but there were several where they had posed the subjects. one of those is above, where a russian woman is posed on a train (the trans-siberian railroad, to be exact), tho' she is, in a sense, posed in her natural habitat. i had to snap it with my iPhone and i love how my own reflection is visible in the photo, which for me, further underlines the documentary nature of the piece...me documenting myself seeing the documentary photograph. that strikes me as powerful on some level, tho' i'm not sure that at the moment i can explain it. it somehow shows how the things we see, especially something like an exhibition, which is intentional on every level, creep into our own topography and become part of us in what we take away.

i think blogging goes well with documentary photography and many of us are amateur documentary photographers, showing our daily lives and the topographies (there's that word again, but it's on my mind of late) of our lives. maybe contours would have been better, but i love the notion of mapping inherent in the word topography. i wonder if blogs will be future source material for sociologists or historians looking at historical moments? or are they so ephemeral, they will just fade away? interesting thoughts to ponder on a grey and dark northern day.